Located, to the surprise of some, just outside the city Schenectady in upstate New York, Unilux Advanced Manufacturing puts a lie to the idea that nobody makes anything in America anymore. From a state-of-the-art facility that is almost as spotless as semiconductor plant, Unilux designs, machines, assembles, packages and ships industrial boiler systems destined for decades of service in commercial buildings, hospitals, hotels, stadiums, commercial high-rises, schools and other facilities throughout North America.

]]>Albany Community Charter School Seeks Mission-Driven Teachershttps://postmktg.com/albany-community-charter-school-video/
Sat, 15 Jul 2017 19:35:26 +0000http://postmktg.com/?p=18928Albany Community Charter School is a family. But with a longer learning day and longer school year, and a high percentage of students from economically disadvantaged households, teaching at ACCS requires a special level of commitment.

This recent video by POSTMKTG explains why some take on the challenge.

POSTMKTG has been working with Albany Community Charter School for several years. Without fail, our spirits are lifted every time we have the opportunity to visit this remarkable institution.

ACCS is a family. But with a longer learning day and longer school year, a high percentage of students from economically disadvantaged households, and with all the political noise surrounding charters, teaching at ACCS requires a special level of commitment. It is not for everybody. However, for select educators, the rewards are more than worth it.

Working with the school’s executive director, Neal Currie, and the excellent production team from 32 Mile Media, POSTMKTG produced this video as part of a focused recruitment and retention effort. It features faculty and administrators talking straight about why they work where they do.

]]>With a Goal No Less Lofty Than Changing How U.S. Infrastructure is Funded!https://postmktg.com/table-rock/
Fri, 14 Jul 2017 20:03:47 +0000http://postmktg.com/?p=18901It was all hands on deck this week as the POSTMKTG team worked with San Francisco-based Table Rock Infrastructure Partners on the launch of its new brand and website. Though courted by several heavy-hitters in its home city, the five year-old company put its trust in us to make their case.

It was all hands on deck this week as the POSTMKTG team worked with San Francisco-based Table Rock Infrastructure Partners on the launch of its new brand and website. Though courted by several heavy-hitters in its home city, the five year-old company put its trust in us to make their case. Our job was to help Table Rock introduce U.S. mayors to public-private partnerships as an option for financing and fixing their crumbling municipal water systems.

This was not a simple advertising problem. Then again, almost nothing we do is.

POSTMKTG specializes in helping smart people convert good ideas into compelling brands. We live to solve hard problems. And we love that audible gasp clients make when they see a website or some other creative that finally makes real the idea they have been trying to get across for years.

In this case, when Table Rock’s managing partner first saw his new site, he just said, “Wow, I didn’t thing anything happened in Albany!” With a laugh we corrected him.

]]>The Ghost of Coca-Colahttps://postmktg.com/the-ghost-of-coca-cola/
Sat, 24 Jun 2017 19:19:11 +0000http://postmktg.com/?p=18971While Schenectady’s famous Coca-Cola sign on Broadway is gone, just up the road, a block in on Edison Ave., a squint and some imagination reveals another. Like so many of these signs, it was overpainted once or twice, and is only now fading back into view. But it's there if you look.

Two years ago, the demolition of 412 Broadway in Schenectady obliterated an icon, an early Coca-Cola ghost sign. The local paper, the Gazette, lamented its loss. While the city still boasts several hand-painted brickfaces from the day (roughly 1900 to 1950), and has even “preserved” one or two by overpainting the originals, inevitably, the privately-held buildings that were once scaled by walldogs, those unheralded lead-poisoned painters responsible for our early-century urban landscape, are being torn down and turned into parking lots.

There’s not much preservationists can do. Except look carefully and document.

While the famous Coke sign on Broadway is gone, just up the road, a block in on on Edison Ave., a squint and some imagination reveals another. It’s not obvious. Like so many of these signs, it was overpainted once or twice, and is only now fading back into view. But it’s there if you look. Presented here in its current state and with a modern logo overlaid to provide visual assistance.

Click image for larger view.

UPDATE: Taking a closer look, I was able to decipher the letters below the Coca-Cola logo. They read “DELICIOUS and REFRESHING,” which means this ghost sign dates to 1920 or earlier. This overlay used the earlier, less slanted version of the Coca-Cola logo, in use during that earlier period. While typography varied with the skill of the sign painter, this earlier logo does seem to line up better with the surviving bits below it.

SECOND UPDATE: The Grems-Doolittle Library Collections at the Schenectady Historical Society maintains a blog and posts photos and articles, including one titled “‘A Street With a Past:’ Images of Broadway.” Scanning through, I spotted an image looking south at Campbell Ave., in the Bellevue neighborhood. If you look carefully just to the right of center, there is a small sign advertising “Pillsbury’s Best.” Best! That’s the word you can read on the building above! This isn’t just a rare old Coca-Cola ghost sign, it’s both a rare Coke and a rare Pillsbury sign in one.

Click image for larger view.

The Pillsbury sign at one time looked exactly like this. I don’t know which advertisement was painted first, but it looks like both were painted out in red at a later date. As with many of these old signs, the lead white used for the primary lettering ‘tattooed’ itself into the brick. Now, as the red washes and chips away, both signs are coming back to life.

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]]>Purchase College Launches Revolutionary Crowdsourced Websitehttps://postmktg.com/purchase-college-web/
Tue, 30 May 2017 15:13:54 +0000http://postmktg.com/?p=18862Purchase College is live. And we could not be prouder!

Throughout the three-year development process, POSTMKTG has served as an expert consultant for this arts-centric SUNY through strategy, RFP, vendor selection, design and key creative development. Our goal from the start was to empower the in-house team at Purchase College.

The new Purchase College website is live. And we could not be prouder!

Throughout the three-year development process, POSTMKTG has served as an expert consultant for this arts-centric SUNY through strategy, RFP, vendor selection, design and key creative development. Our goal from the start was to empower the in-house team at Purchase College; to help them create a site that exposed and promoted all of the performances, guest lectures, protests, discoveries, publications, food, art, celebrations and other events that erupt daily across this amazing campus.

We had two big reasons why.

First, and most pragmatically, we wanted a site rich in fresh and relevant content, where keywords and all the other things that Google loves are a natural consequence of daily activity. With campus content fully exposed, people seeking a more creative college would always find it, right there on the first page of their search results.

Second, and as importantly, we wanted a site that promoted everything happening at Purchase in all its wonderful naked glory. Our goal was to counter a tendency, common at conservatories, toward siloed educational experiences. Dancers, musicians, actors, artists and the kind of academics attracted to Purchase are sometimes so into their own studies that they miss out on the bigger, broader, interdisciplinary experiences promised by the Purchase tagline, “think wide open.”

POSTMKTG guided the Purchase team toward a collective agreement that the key was to create a site that 1) provided real promotional utility to all the of the campus’ zillion interest groups; 2) exposed (and fully exploited) the campus’ incredible creative energy; and 3) gave real incentive to “the crowd” to create original content while simultaneously providing the tools that organized that content and made sharing it super easy. Knowing all this focused the RFP, helped the college’s executive council appropriate an adequate budget, and gave the in-house team the parameters and aspirational goals they needed to select an appropriate web development partner and carry the project through to completion.

POSTMKTG stayed attached throughout the development process, providing a critical third-party perspective, comments (when called on) and key creative copy to help the site sing at launch.

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]]>Updated: Fading to Modernhttps://postmktg.com/fading-to-modern/
Sun, 09 Apr 2017 08:03:27 +0000http://postmktg.com/?p=18805With the demolition of Schenectady’s Nicholaus Block, the Capital Region lost one of its last surviving examples of the 100-year old Uneeda Biscuit campaign. Though only a fragment, this “ghost sign” was one of the best preserved Uneeda examples in the country.

We thought it a good time to reprise our January 2017 rumination on weather and typography.

It was promoted everywhere, primarily through billboards painted on the sides of buildings. At least eight recognizable examples survive in New York’s Capital Region alone.

Most are in rough shape. Which is not unexpected, as they’ve been exposed to the elements for 100 years or more. Yet, despite their age, through a combination of bare essentialism and bold typography, they come off as strikingly modern.

It’s an illusion.

When freshly painted, the typical Uneeda Biscuit sign featured a garish, two-tone green background, a red and white Nabisco logo and a dark drop shadow under the brand name. Only as the decorative elements washed away, leaving behind a basic sans-serif font chemically tattooed into the bricks below, did they evolve.

With their letterform quirks obscured, and with the color drained and the drop shadow gone, these ghost signs look more like modern Helvetica-based campaigns than turn-of-the-century relics, with a few of the over-painted double exposures fading to Dada-esque typographic experiments.

Sans-serif fonts are a relatively modern development (by historical standards). The first commercially available sans-serif, Caslon, didn’t appear until 1816, and it wasn’t until the later 19th century, when circus promoters started deploying big block letters on large format lithographed posters, that fonts with no serifs started to look normal … modern. Even then, the fonts were often buried in color and decoration, not allowed to tell a story on their own.

Which makes me ask the question, was weather a factor in sculpting our modern typographic sensibilities?

UPDATESadly, on April 7th, 2017, the Nicholaus Block was declared unstable and demolished. According to press reports, the city engineer warned of immanent collapse after a crack opened near the tower. A tragedy, as the well-preserved Uneeda brickface was scheduled to be covered by the abutting wall of a new apartment block. Although hidden, this historic fragment would have survived, perhaps longer than any other example nationally.

N. Salina St. (Rt. 11) in Syracuse features ghost sign after ghost sign. While a few have been “restored,” or wrecked if you are a purist, the overall effect in this case is pretty positive. Several blocks of history, with the restorations helping the casual stroller take notice of the originals.

Of note: Ceresota Flour, one of the first agency-created brands. Uneeda Biscuit,though recently restored, its original paint is already reasserting itself. Day Motor Co. Inc., in both original and repainted condition, which offers a nice contrast. And barely legible Mail Pouch Tobacco, which along with Coca-Cola, Uneeda and Ceresota, was a ubiquitous feature of the American urban landscape in the first decades of the twentieth century.

[This article was published originally in 2014. At the time, Coca Cola was facing a social media storm for airing a 30-second spot on the Super Bowl that featured a multicultural cast singing “America the Beautiful.” Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the spot was quickly retired. So we were quite surprised to see “It’s Beautiful,” in all its original glory, run in the opening commercial break of this year’s Super Bowl (2017). Given the current political climate, with an argument raging between the U.S. executive and judicial branches over the president’s order to halt travel and immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, and the anger and calls to boycott this spot predictably creates, we consider Coke’s decision brave. More than mere marketing. Patriotic even.]

Twitter exploded seconds after Coca Cola had the temerity to run a Super Bowl commercial celebrating diversity in the United States. The spot’s soundtrack featured a rendition of America the Beautiful sung by children in English, Spanish … and six other languages.

Oh, horror of horrors.

The spot also showcased a group of Muslim-American girls getting Chinese food from a street vendor, some African-American kids breakdancing and a gay family ice-skating.

Racist and xenophobic comments spewed. Threats of boycott were issued. “This is America, we speak English“ more than a few tweets stated, non-ironically.

Coke has produced some of the most adorable “can’t we all just get along” advertising over the last few years, and may not have been intentionally courting controversy with #AmericaIsBeautiful. It most certainly cannot be loving the comments which, as of this writing, are still spilling down its Facebook page. I suspect the creative folks at Wieden+Kennedy, the agency that produced the spot, weren’t all that surprised. That firm is famous for exploiting cultural touchstones to gin up engagement. But I bet even they’re taken aback a bit.

Why Did the Coke Spot Spark So Much Anger?

Everybody knows the Super Bowl is not just another football game. It’s a national holiday. Almost sacred. Well, actually, kind of anti-sacred.

With New Years, once a day of national hangover and regret, now pretty much tamed by actual prison sentences for driving while intoxicated, a space has opened in our culture for a new “inversion” holiday. Like Rome’s Saturnalia and medieval Europe’s Feast of Fools, the Super Bowl has become our day for reversing the social order and celebrating, for a day or a week, depending on your level of fandom, all the things we’re required to control the rest of the year.

Anything intellectual, ecclesiastical or feminized (which of late has become the worst of sins) is lampooned, satirized and aggressively ignored.

The Super Bowl has become a kind of cultural safety valve. A time when resentments are aired, brutality is pedestalized and gluttony is condoned. Apparently, as long as its celebrants agree to go back to work on Monday, and spend their wages on Dodge Rams,Doritos and Maseratis(?) the rest of the year, no controls will be imposed during the celebration.

Could this be why the Coke spot generated such vitriolic spew?

Personally, I loved the spot. Thought it an instant classic. But I don’t think my opinion counts, as I haven’t been invested in a Super Bowl since 1969. (And speaking of Joe Namath and the Super Bowl …)

But to a certain segment of those in the thrall, Coke’s spot apparently was read as an insult; a preachy bit of political correctness injected into the middle of what everyone agreed was supposed to be a breasts-out-bacchanalia, even if GoDaddy disappointed this year.

But Here’s Why Coke’s Spot Was (Perhaps) Accidentally Brilliant

Good advertising is often polarizing. Go down the middle and nobody notices. But take a controversial position and you can gain a rabid following. Even if you drive most prospects away, the ones who remain become fierce brand loyalists.

It’s so good a strategy that Kraft once cooked up a quasi-controversy to promote Miracle Whip.

But Coca Cola is in a different league. The Atlanta-based company holds down the #1 and #2 spots in the soft drink biz, with Coke and Diet Coke. Pepsi’s has been #3 for a while. As Coca Cola has no place to go but down, courting controversy seems, on the surface at least, quite a stupid strategy.

Yet, after heaven knows how many gazillion dollars spent, there went Coke, with a more-or-less traditional 30-second spot that drove the racists of America to embrace its rival’s brand … and broadcast their love of Pepsi to the world.

Coke has managed to brand Pepsi as the choice of a reactionary and racist generation. Who knows, that positioning may play domestically for Pepsi. But internationally, it means trouble.

[Update: Thanks to Doug Tonks for the proofreading! If anybody wants to hire a good editor?]

]]>Roadside Classics: The ‘Norge Ball’https://postmktg.com/roadside-classics-the-norge-ball/
Tue, 20 Dec 2016 22:30:37 +0000http://postmktg.com/?p=18762Though disappearing fast, bits of beautiful roadside advertising from the 1950’s and 1960’s are still out there. And for me, great fun to find and document.

Though quickly giving way to a brain-numbing repetitious cheap cartoon background of Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, Mobile Gas and Dunkin’ Donuts, bits of the more eccentric roadside advertising of the 1950’s and 1960’s are still visible.

Here’s one I must have driven by more than 1,000 times in my life, but noticed just three days ago.

Improbably perched atop a tuxedo rental shop on Central Avenue in Albany, NY, this once-animated 10-foot diameter Wonder Bread-like orb once advertised Norge Laundry & Cleaning Village. According to Roadside Architecture, 50 years ago, there were 3,400 of these across the country. About 60 are known to survive. There is a postcard on Flickr that will give you a good sense of the “Jeston’s optimism” this sign once signaled.